If you’re looking to ramp up your link building efforts I strongly suggest article submissions. The links you get from submitting the articles can really help you rank for less competitive keywords.

So here’s what you wanna do:

1. Write a good article on a specific topic. Pick 1 medium to long tail keyword and focus on that as you write.
2. Proofread and make sure the article is pretty solid.
3. Submit to EzineArticles and wait for it to be approved. EzineArticles is the best article site out there and only accepts unique articles so you have to publish there first.
4. Now use Article Submission Helper (free at http://www.articlesubmissionhelper.com) to ’spin” new versions of the article. By “spin”, what you do in Article Submission Helper is rewrite a few sections in the article to give various options for those sections. Then Article Submission Helper will randomly pick from the various sections and come up with a unique article.
5. Also in Article Submission Helper you can submit to a ton of different article sites and even rotate (“spin”) your bio to get different types of anchor text.

To give it a try head over to http://www.articlesubmissionhelper.com. Again, its total free and definitely worth a try.

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How to Treat your Blog like a Business – Title explains this one pretty well already…
30 Blog Improvement Tips to Increase Your Traffic – Some are pretty basic, but others are worth the read for.
Pro Blogger Daniel Scocco Shares his Internet Marketing Tips – A bunch of interesting and useful ideas.
Review of CrazyEgg – Ok, yea this is a post from this blog, but I think you should read it and give CrazyEgg a try. Definitely worth it.
How to Use Google’s Wonder Wheel to Find Topics to Write about – Was really excited to see this.
73 Ways to Become a Better Writer – Like all list posts, some are quite basic but the list as a whole is valuable in my opinion.

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After watching Tim Ferriss’ video on blogging I couldn’t help but give CrazyEgg a try and its pretty damn awesome.

I set up a mini test on FreshTrend.com which is another site that I run and the CrazyEgg software automatically tracks what visitors are doing on the page: where they click, what pages they go to next, where they came from, etc. It sounds on the surface like its not much different than Google Analytics, which is why I was skeptical. But Crazy Egg blows GA out of the water in terms of getting actionable results.

For example, this morning I setup a test of the site homepage to monitor the next 3,000 visitor and after just 300 so far I can already tell that I need to improve the bottom part of my pages since many people are actually reading through the whole post and then clicking the “Next” link (which is tiny). By making that bigger I bet I’ll drastically improve people clicking on that and thus keep them on the site longer. The beauty of CrazyEgg is that after I make that change I’ll be able to test it and see how well it works out.

Final analysis: Anyone serious about their blog should give CrazyEgg a try, even if you try for just 1 month you’ll learn a ton about your blog’s visitors.

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Best Bets

1. Flickr – Under Creative Commons you can use a lot of the images on Flickr, just make sure you give the appropriate credit.

2. Stock.Xchng – Big collection of free stock photos, some have weird license terms, but the collection and variety is pretty amazing.

3. MorgueFile – The amount of photos is a bit limited but the quality is really quite high.

4. Stock Vault – More of an exchange for images between photographers but you can snag some free images from here even if you’re not a photographer.

5. EveryStockPhoto – Search engine of free stock photos. Very useful for deep dives looking for images.

Hit or Miss

6. FreeRange – Nice collection of good quality images.

7. FreeFoto – Collection is a bit limited, but occasionally you’ll find exactly what you need.

8. Pixel Galerie – Site isn’t in English but isn’t that hard to navigate and does have some nice pictures.

9. Unprofound – Decent collection in both size and quality, but nothing too amazing.

10. Public-Domain-Photos.com – A few thousand images only but you might stumble on what you need.

Longshots

11. Google Images – You can always search images on Google and then contact the site owner of any images that come up to see if you can have permission to use the image. Not very likely to work, but you never know. Your odds will be better if you’re non-commercial.

When All Else Fails…

12. If none of those worked out then I suggest iStockPhoto. Pictures are super cheap and really nice quality, but not quite free

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If you don’t know Tim Ferriss, he’s the real deal. Super successful and full of a lot of interesting ideas on blogging and life in general. The video is a bit long but well worth a watch. Titled “How to Blog and Not Kill Yourself”

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For new blogs especially, picking up a few links from blog directories can help get the search engines to notice your site. But knowing which blogs are best to submit to can be tricky. Here’s our favorites:

Best Free Blog Directories

Blogged.com – Nice, easy to use site. Free listings and a decent place to find other bloggers.

Spill Bean – Like this one a lot especially since it took the blod step to not have ‘blog’ in its name. Bravo SpillBean.

Bloggapedia – Not a lot of blogs listed, which could be a good or a bad thing, but its worth a try.

Blog Catalog – Make sure your blog has a bunch of content before you submit, but once it does Blog Catalog is well worth submitting to.

Blogging Fusion – The header reads “Total blogs approved this week: ( 2 )” and its Thursday currently, so although its free I’m not sure many sites get let in.

Best Paid Blog Directories

Best of the Web Blogs – If you pay for any blog directories, this is the one to pay for.

Eaton Web – Probably the next best paid blog directory out there. $34.99 to list but its unfortunately an annual fee.

Bloggeries.com – $39.99 seems a bit steep for a mediocre site, but it is a one time only fee which is nice and would be a nice link to snag.

Worst Blog Directories – Avoid These

BiggerBlogger.com – Total waste of time. You have to register just to find out it costs $1/month to be on the site.

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